Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism

JEWISH MYTH, MAGIC, AND MYSTICISM is devoted to all aspects of Jewish esoteric traditions and occult lore.
It is the official blog for the Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism.
The JMMM has been recognized as one of the top 50 Jewish blogs on the internet in 2010

Friday, August 27, 2010

The Passion of Israel's God

The very nice folks at Parabola Magazine, a quarterly journal devoted to the thematic

[God seeks Man - the Dura Europos Synagogue]

exploration of the world's spiritual and mythic traditions, have just published an article by me in their Fall issue.

Entitled A Song of Desire: the Yearnings of Israel's God, it begins like this:

What is desire (Heb. Ta’eiv; Ta’avah; Teiavon), and what is its role in the cosmos? Desire is the craving to fill an absence, and once possessed, to cling to that which fulfills. Western thought sees desire as driving the world. It is, the Greeks taught, the appetitive nature of the soul that compels motion. And since at least Plato, desire has also been considered a problem to be managed. Aristotle regarded it to be the irrational part of the soul, an impulse to be curbed by the control of reason.[i]

But what if the world is not merely filled with desire? What if the world is desire? In some Eastern thought, desire tethered to ignorance is the world, and as such it is the flywheel that perpetuates suffering.[ii] Jews, too hold that the universe is made up of longing, but in the Hebrew imagination, desire is lyric, not dirge. It is the music of creation, and longing the resonant instrument that reveals the meaning of the cosmos. This secret truth is concealed in the very first word of the Hebrew Bible, BeRESHIT, the word for “creation” itself. The secret is uncovered by re-arranging its six Hebrew letters. Doing this discloses that creation is a SHIR Ta’EiV, a “song of desire” (Zohar Hadash 5b-6a). Creation is one great ballad of longing, and God is the One who sings this lyric in endless variations.....To read the rest of the article, you can purchase the Fall 2010 "Desire" issue of Parabola at your local Barnes and Noble, or by going directly to http://www.parabola.org/.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Consider Yourself Warned: Sneezing in Jewish Folklore

[Kyle Gets It]

It is remarkable how Jewish tradition, in its careful reading of the Bible, discovers stories hidden beneath stories. Even more extraordinary is the wit to see a story lurking in a lack of story. Take illness. The first person who is described as ill is our ancestor Jacob (Gen. 48:1). This led some perspicuous Jewish reader to ask the question, "Why is this first mention of an ill person so late in the story of humanity? Could it be that Jacob is the first person to experience illness?" And that's exactly what happened. Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer was the first to fully develop this thought:

From the day the heavens and earth were created, no man was ever ill... Rather, in any place he happened to be, whether on the way or in the market, when he sneezed his soul left through his nostrils. [So it was] until our ancestor Jacob came and prayed for mercy concerning this, saying, Blessed Holy One, do not take my soul from me until I have blessed my sons and my household; so He accepted him, as it was said, "And it came to pass after these things that one came to Joseph and said, "Look, your father is ill."..... (PdRE 52).

Thus a sneeze, once the very act of expiration itself, comes to be understood to be an act of divine compassion, an omen that death is approaching.

This is an idea very much in keeping with the idea, rooted in the Bible (Gen. 1:26), that the spirit enters and leaves through the nose, and that all humans are pneumatically permeable, that various spirits (of wisdom [Exo. 28:3, 31:3], prophecy [Num. 11:17, 29], and woe [I Sam. 16:23]) pass easily in and out of the body, and that our very souls even leave us on a temporary basis while we sleep (the Elohai Neshamah morning prayer).

Of course, an omen can be averted with the proper ritual or words of power. And so it is that Jews came to believe it was obligatory to respond to a sneeze with a word or phrase to counteract it:

....Therefore a man is duty bound to say to his fellow who sneezes, Chayyim! [Life!] changing death in the world into light [fulfilling the promise of Scripture] as is written, "His sneezes flash forth light" (Job. 41:10)....

Other phrases evolved to keep the soul within the body, such as l'chayyim tovim [Hebrew], marpe, assuta [Aramaic], zu gesund, and gesundheit [Yiddish].

The fact that this was more than just a wish, but actually a counter spell, is made clear in arguments in the Tosefta, where some Sages worry that the blessing response may in fact be a "Way of the Amorites" [the Talmudic idiom for witchcraft] (T. Shabbat 7:5).

Over time this concern subsided and, as the medieval Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer highlights, a blessing in response to a sneeze came to be considered mandatory.

About Me

Geoff Dennis is rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami and teaches Kabbalah and Rabbinic Literature in the Jewish Studies Program at the University of North Texas. He is the author of The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism, a 2007 National Book Award finalist, and recipient of an Honorable Mention for the 2007 Jewish Library Council Book Award. He has written numerous articles. The most recent, "Purity and Transformation:The Mimetic Performance of Scriptural Texts in the Ritual of Taharah," is in the Journal of Ritual Studies 26 (1), 2012.